Authors: Cat Thao Nguyen
At MacKillop I was a diligent student. I stayed up all night to memorise textbooks. I did not go to any parties and knew nothing of boys. Life was study leavened with rations of
Astro Boy
,
Transformers
and
Monkey Magic
. I always kept the top button of my shirt done up. The library was shared between the boys and girls high schools but it was located at St John’s. I tried to avoid going to the library at lunchtime because it meant crossing the boys’ playground – an utterly mortifying experience. If it was an urgent and pressing assignment, I would quickly power walk my way across the bitumen, head down, focusing on my footsteps. Boys, handballs, court lines flurried past my peripheral vision.
When the students had left for the day, I stayed after school in the library three days a week to get extra work done. I entered statewide mathematics and science competitions. One year I
created a board game around Pythagoras’ Theorem. I went to the hardware store to buy chipboard, brass hinges and screws, and made a coloured numbered spinner instead of dice. It was a simple concept: random questions around Pythagoras’ Theorem had to be answered before the player could move. They had to reach the end of the squiggly series of coloured squares. There was a limit of four players. I won an award. Of course. I had to receive an award, even if it was for supreme nerdiness.
I was part of the debating team and always second speaker. I was not confident enough to open but was a little too egotistical to settle for summing up as third speaker. Second was where I felt comfortable. It was the position in the debate where you could really solidify the win or turn things around. Unless our school hosted, most of the time we had to travel to other schools each Friday night during debate season. My father would drop me off at the school and my English teacher, a feisty Greek Australian woman with dyed orange hair and worry lines between her eyebrows, drove me to the hosting school every week. My father would wait outside my school at about 9 or 10 pm to pick me up. Only once did a police officer question him for parking in the dark outside a school on a Friday night.
I think my parents only ever watched one debate. Even then they didn’t understand what was being said, so there was really no point in them attending. They were busy working and trying to surmount all the obstacles I wasn’t fully aware of at the time. We had an understanding. My job was to study hard, translate
for them, deal with government authorities, banks and insurance providers, and look after Vinh.
In year eight, I came first in every subject except one, in which I came second. I don’t know whether my parents understood what a feat this was. I had even come first in English and physical education. Although I was small, I was sufficiently agile to pass all the physical tasks. I was far more challenged than the broad-shouldered swimmer types but managed to overcompensate in the theory component. It really didn’t matter how well I went at shot-put or javelin. I named all the sports in a decathlon as well as all the moves in floor gymnastics and the array of gymnastics equipment.
Ironically, the subject I came second in was Vietnamese. Apparently I couldn’t be the best all of the time. Because of the number of Vietnamese- and Arabic-speaking students at the school, the school offered these languages in addition to the standard Italian and French. Vietnamese was taught by Ms Ngoc. She had a short bob and large plastic-rimmed glasses. She looked best when she wore a navy skirt with a white shirt that had large navy polka dots. She didn’t have matching navy high heels but her black pointy closed-toe shoes were sufficient. Everyone in the class was of Vietnamese origin. In the Italian class there was a Vietnamese girl whose family had been resettled in Italy before moving to Australia. She spoke better Italian than the second-generation Italian kids.
I wrote lots of stories in Vietnamese class during those first couple of years of high school. My mother kept many of them.
There is a story about a girl who grows up, falls in love and gets married to a Vietnamese guy. She finds out that her husband and her father are the same type. In the story, I had written in Vietnamese ‘men are all useless’. Some concepts transcend language and culture!
When I received ninety-nine per cent in a maths exam, my father asked me why I didn’t get a hundred. When I came second in Vietnamese, he asked why I didn’t come first, despite coming first in all the other subjects. It was a kind of tough love that confuses children growing up in a western society, where television parents regularly give unconditional hugs and tell their children, ‘I love you’. Or where parents say, ‘as long as you do your best’. Ludicrous. How can mediocrity ever be okay? I may not have had a Tiger Mum yelling at me, but the pressure was there. I was raised with the typical academic expectations of Asian children as reported on tabloid current affairs shows and caricatured by my fellow Australians on the ABC. But I didn’t play the violin or piano; we couldn’t afford the lessons. It might not be reasonable but the pressure to excel academically makes sense. As people who are physically smaller, we didn’t have a real chance at being sports stars unless it was in table tennis, badminton or snooker. Maybe golf. But the cost of golf club memberships would exclude most refugees. The only legal way to attain financial security for families with no capital, no language and no political access was education.
As a kid, I understood this instinctively. Even as I meticulously decorated my year two weather project with glitter pen, I knew.
When my mother had a minor car accident with a Bankstown real estate agent when I was seven, I negotiated with him over the phone in English while my mother sat beside me nervously. When the landlady in Punchbowl berated my mother for not paying the rent on time or not keeping the kitchen clean, I translated. I watched as my mother stood silent in her attempt to retain her self-respect. I didn’t know how to translate dignity. Or grace. My mind wasn’t quick or brave enough to rebut the landlady on her behalf. All I could do was stand there, telling my mother off in Vietnamese for the landlady. A borrowed mouth of poison.
I had been trained in the language of responsibility and sacrifice. I was exposed to the intimate moments of quiet humiliation that accumulate like rust when a parent must rely on their small child to read medicine packaging, to fill out application forms. For grown-up things. And I knew that it was my job to study hard and succeed, to make my parents’ years of sacrifice worthwhile—which meant that nothing could be allowed to disrupt my studies.
One day, I got off the train at Punchbowl station as usual and started walking home down Rossmore Avenue. Jessica Jones and her older sister Peta also got off at Punchbowl. Jessica was in the same year as me and we had gone to primary school together but weren’t really friends. Jessica was a stocky girl with glossy blonde hair. Her sister was freckled and slender. She excelled in athletics. Their mother did shifts at the St Jerome’s canteen and was probably head of the parents and teachers committee as well. When I bought twenty cents’ worth of liquorice at the canteen,
I would politely say hello to Mrs Jones. I secretly daydreamed that my mother would also be behind the metal grilles, serving fellow pupils with a warm smile and keen eyes. I imagined my mother being an active member of the school community so that I would have some sort of respect in the classroom and playground. But that was never to be the case.
As I walked down Rossmore Avenue, I noticed that the Jones sisters were walking behind me. The air was crisp. It was sunny. The size and weight of my school bag was not commensurate to my fragile frame. I felt like a sea tortoise stranded in suburban Sydney cursed to bear a heavy sack of knowledge and solitude. At the upper end of St Jerome’s playground, where it met a pedestrian crossing on Rossmore Avenue, there was a giant tree. For six years throughout primary school, I played under and around it. Its roots exploded through the tar beneath and its wisdom emerged from the ground like a lost tune. Its branches and leaves rose, sprawled and towered above like a cloud. Trapped and beautiful. Wild and safe. This tree had watched me grow. It had witnessed my loneliness and soothed my sadness. I went to the tree to cry, to tell it my secrets, to hide. One Lunar New Year as I walked past the tree, I saw a lucky red envelope sitting idly underneath it. There was no one around. I opened the small envelope and inside was twenty dollars! The tree smiled as I ran home to tell my mother.
So on my way home from the station, I crossed the road just to walk into the tree’s soothing orbit. I was walking past the tree as I sensed the Jones sisters drawing closer.
Jessica asked her sister, ‘What’s the difference between ET and Asians?’
‘I don’t know,’ Peta replied. ‘Tell me.’
‘ET got the message and went home.’
They laughed out loud then crossed over to the other side of the street. I was both humiliated and confused by this exchange. I
was
home. At least that’s what I’d thought. Where else would I go?
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
But what name had I been called exactly? And why did I feel so ashamed? I looked over at the tree. Its branches tried to reach out to caress me, having witnessed the exchange.
It was time for me to move schools. I was sick of ethnic wars. Sick of shame. I needed to soar.
A teacher at my school was switching to a new school down south called Bethany College. It had a junior campus in Kogarah and another campus at Hurstville for years nine to twelve. The uniform was maroon and grey. I decided to call the school to set up an interview with the principal. She was a lovely round lady with smiling eyes. When I showed her my school reports and grades she was baffled as to why I wanted to leave all my friends and go to Bethany, which wasn’t close to where we lived. In hindsight, I don’t understand how I was able to be brave enough to leave my school and friends. But I was too young to have developed a real sense of community—and far too focused. My sole objective was to succeed academically. My resolve came
from a source far deeper than a uniform. A source I could only articulate when I slept next to my mother.
So I said goodbye to my MacKillop friends. It was bittersweet. A lot of the teachers and students thought that by my departure I was insinuating the school wasn’t good enough for me. I know that they quietly resented my decision, given I was a star student.
At the time, my family had been vegetarian for about five years. A combination of Cao Đài scriptures, Buddhist teachings, Bible chapters and documentaries on Nostradamus about the end of the world had convinced my parents that we had a better chance of surviving Armageddon if we didn’t eat meat. Animal meat would weigh down our spirits. Only a few years earlier, in primary school, my mother had made Văn and I eat steamed pigs’ brains for intelligence. The brains weren’t even mashed in with vegetables or stir-fried. They were just squiggly clumps of nutty creaminess, straight from a school science room and flavoured with chicken stock. On one of my last few days at MacKillop, I decided I deserved a meat pie. At lunchtime I lined up at the canteen and furtively bought a pie with sauce. I sat alone and scoffed it down, making sure no one saw me. All my friends knew I didn’t eat meat. One of my friends, a Vietnamese girl, was also vegetarian for the same reasons. I chewed the pie so fast my mouth was almost burned. I quickly went to the bathroom to wash out any lingering smell of meat. Then I returned to my friends who, thankfully, didn’t suspect a thing. I was already a sinner. With the taste of a meat pie and teary goodbyes behind me, I left Mackillop Girls High School.
When I joined Bethany College, I was the only student of Vietnamese origin in my grade. It was another all-girls Catholic school but most of the families were far more affluent than those back at MacKillop. I would walk to the bus station near Punchbowl train station and catch the bus to Hurstville station. Forty minutes later I would arrive and hop onto another bus which would drop me off at Bethany. A friend of mine from MacKillop had already left to go to Bethany not long before I arrived. I joined her group of friends, which consisted of Australian-born girls of Malaysian, Greek and Yugoslavian descent.
I was still a repressed, sensitive and timid girl. But by now I had hairy legs and acne as well as my Best & Less shoes, and my mother still sewed most of my clothes. I quickly realised that I was practically the only one in the whole school who did
not have brand-name shoes. Sports day was a torment. I don’t know what it was but some of the students would occasionally make snide comments to me. I felt like an outcast. I decided I needed a pair of Nikes. I read in my local paper that a new McDonald’s was opening in Punchbowl and they were hiring. My father drove me to the interview. It went well. But at the end of it, the interviewer realised that I was three months under the minimum legal working age. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Come back in three months,’ she told me. But I didn’t have three months! My acne wasn’t going to fade, electrolysis was too expensive and in three months’ time I would be even more isolated and bullied. I had to find a place that didn’t mind child labour and would pay cash. There was only one option: Uncle Thanh and his wife’s bakery in Matraville.
I worked hard on weekends, sweeping the floors, slicing the bread, making pork rolls and packing sweet buns. When I’d finally made enough money for a pair of Nike Airwalks, my mother and Văn accompanied me to the Rebel Sports warehouse on the Hume Highway in Bankstown. The smell of fresh tennis gear, cotton and polyester gym pants, dry-fit shirts and new treadmills was intoxicating. New smelled oh so good! The aisles of shoes opened to me like a shrine of glorious Nike divinity. I glided down the aisles until I found them: white, green and a swoosh of pink. As I held them in my hands, I was overcome with pure joy. It was a religious experience. With my Nikes I would be reborn. I would be saved.